This was a very long and tiresome journey that I wouldn’t particularly want to do again. However for us it was necessary as it was the cheapest way of getting from Laos to Vietnam, and when you’re budget travelling this is high on your list of priorities. We booked using 12GoAsia and it cost us around £66.
The journey began in Vientiane, the capital of Laos. Our bus wasn’t until 5:30pm so we had a fair bit of time to kill from checking out of our accommodation to actually getting on the bus.
My first piece of advice is to be prepared with food and drinks.
We spent some time the day before leaving Vientiane going round supermarkets (which weren’t brilliant) gathering supplies for our bus journey. Now ‘gathering supplies’ may sound extreme but I am very pleased we did this.
If you don’t take food and drinks with you then your only options are to eat the canteen style food at the service stations (which looked questionable), survive on overpriced service station snacks, or simply not eat.
We gathered a strange assortment of items including a loaf of bread each, peppers (for nutritional value of course), various crisps, Oreos, nuts and water.
We noticed on the bus that no one had done the same as us which I thought was foolish. We were prepared and had plenty of food to get us through the seemingly never ending journey to Vietnam.
We hung around for several hours in Vientiane bus station where it was incredibly hot. Getting hot and sweaty before the bus journey even began wasn’t ideal but we had no say in the matter.
Eventually the bus appeared and we established there was a toilet on board. Hurrah! If you’re familiar with transport in South East Asia then you will know there usually isn’t a toilet on board so you’re reliant on toilet stops that are few and far between. As this journey was 24 hours I was anxious about the toilet situation so felt extremely relieved when I heard there was a toilet on the bus.
My second piece of advice is have toilet paper with you.
Although there was some toilet paper in the toilet on the bus, it did run out. Often there isn’t any toilet paper so don’t get caught short.
We boarded the bus and were assigned our seats. We were right at the back at the bus which worked in our favour because we had some extra storage space for our bags and great amounts of food.
On sleeper buses there are beds on an upper and lower level. They are pretty narrow and to get to the upper ones you have to pull yourself up the world’s smallest ladder. It is a bit of a challenge.
The journey began and we set off down the bumpiest roads in Laos for what seemed like hours. At times I thought I was going to be flung off my bed.
We passed the time by eating and watching previously downloaded Netflix shows. This part of the journey was actually alright. The beds were relatively comfortable.
At 2am the bus came to a stop. We had arrived at the Laos border which didn’t open until 7am. Along the way the driver had picked up quite a few local people who were just laid on the floor. This made it impossible to get out of our beds to use the toilet.
We got a few hours of sleep and were rudely awoken by the driver who whipped open the curtains on the bed at 6:30am. Little did we know that the next two hours would be horrible. It was raining, cold, and we were half asleep. We stood around in the cold and rain until the border office opened.
During this time several people came up to us trying to sell us SIM cards. We said no.
My next piece of advice would be buy a SIM card at the border.
If we had purchased a SIM card at the border I think it would have saved us a lot of stress and hassle once we arrived in Hanoi. That will be explained in a little while.
We had some communication issues at the border and to be honest didn’t really know what was going on. The drivers didn’t speak any English and no one there was very helpful.
To exit Laos you had to buy a ticket (it cost around 40p/11,000 Lao Kip each) from one office and then take the ticket, along with your passport, to another office. They then stamped you out of Laos.
Our bus had started to drive over the border so we had a soggy walk over to the Vietnam border. Here it was very confusing. Our passports were checked multiple times by different people and then taken off us. We had to pay around £2 (about 65,000 Vietnamese Dong) each to enter Vietnam too so make sure you have cash on you to pay fees like this.
Our luggage was put through a scanner and then we were just left standing around. We were pretty fed up by this point and desperately wanted to be back on the bus. Eventually our passports were given back and we got back on the bus.
We were freezing cold and wet from the rain. This leads to my next bit of advice which is have extra clothes easily accessible.
Our clothes were now wet and we had a long time ahead of us on the bus. I would have loved some dry clothes to change into. Jacob even more so because he was next to the window which made him even colder. You are given a blanket on the bus but this wasn’t really doing much.
The rest of the journey was pretty uneventful and we were glad when it was over. It was around 6pm when we arrived in Hanoi. It was dark, cold, and we didn’t have a clue where we were.
This is where my previous piece of advice where buying a SIM card at the border would have been useful. What followed for us was a very painful two hours of wandering around Hanoi trying to find our Airbnb. Hanoi is a crazy busy place and after a 24 hour bus journey this isn’t what you want to be doing.
Luckily we did have some Vietnamese currency on us so we were able to get a taxi and eventually buy a SIM card. So finally have a small amount of currency for each country you visit. This will get you out of some sticky situations.
Top tips summary-
- Buy food and drink before beginning the bus journey.
- Always have toilet paper with you.
- Buy a SIM card at the border or download an E-SIM.
- Have cash on you to pay fees at the border.
- Have a change of clothes easily accessible.
- Have a small amount of currency for the country you’re arriving in.
Down to Earth Travel 
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